Saturday, November 29, 2014

Oh well, on to basketball

Wait, Tech beat us at that, too.

Pretty miserable year, but then at least a down year for Mark Richt is a 9 and 3 season.

Has Mark Fox surpassed .500 since he's been here? I think he had a 85 and 77 overall record before the season started. We're 3 and 3 since then, so Fox is barely managing .500 in year six of his tenure.

Don't remember what I was expecting when Fox was brought on, but it wasn't losing to Tech four times in a row, and it wasn't playing .500 ball. We can beat the scrubs who have to travel by bus to Stegeman, but I'd like to see us beat some solid Division I teams.

We'll have our chance soon. We play Colorado and Kansas State in December.

Maybe we'll go on a run. In all honesty, though, I don't see how without a real post game. No slight meant to Thornton and Djurisic. They try hard, and they're great representatives of the program. Yet and still, they're forwards who have to match up with other team's centers. Thornton had the knee surgeries and never really regained his rim-rocking physicality from high school, and Djurisic is more of a stretch four. We don't have a big skilled guy in the middle, and Kenny Gaines' sickness has exposed our lack of scoring everywhere else.

The SEC slate did us well last year, now that SEC basketball got rid of the division format. We don't have to play Florida and Kentucky twice each year, and South Carolina, Alabama, Auburn and Texas A&M are in about as bad a shape as we are. Other than Kentucky, I think we match up pretty well with just about everybody. The problem is that judging by the games played so far, UGA looks like a border-line NIT team, not one that will do real damage in the NCAA Tourney.

I would be a lot more optimistic on the whole if we had bagged one of the Wheeler players for the 2015 recruiting class. We didn't get it done. 6' 10" big man Daniel Giddens got scooped up by Ohio State and it appears that athletic small forward Jaylen Brown is headed elsewhere.

Wish we would have hired an Atlanta high school head coach to see if we could get a pipeline going in recruiting. Maybe the incoming recruits we did will play above their ranking. Jackson, Ogbeide and Wilridge may help next year.

In the meantime, we'll adjust expectations downward and hope for the best.